The last Republican presidential candidate to win California was George H.W. Bush, back in 1988. Last week, George Will suggested that a new sort of “Goldwater 2.0” conservatism, represented by the state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Neel Kashkari, might at least color the state purple and force Democrats to fight, once again, for its 55 electoral college votes.

What is Goldwater 2.0? A mixture of an immigrant upbringing, a job at Goldman Sachs, a first-hand view of bailing out banks ‘too big to fail’ while working under Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a non-threatening pro-choice and pro-same sex marriage social libertarianism, and (apparently) an orientation in Will’s words toward “discerning silver linings on black clouds.”

While Goldwater’s own brand of conservatism certainly evolved after the 1964 presidential race, Kashkari’s 21st century conservative operating system is plenty different from the one that prompted Goldwater to proclaim in his (in)famous 1964 Republican acceptance speech: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue.”

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Such bold words spoken today by a conservative candidate might provoke a MSM-led 21st century Salem Witch Trial with Senator Harry Reid playing the part of chief inquisitor. But that’s just the point, some on the right argue: even a less radical conservatism, at least taken out of context, is a political liability. And as there’s no preventing those covering politics from taking it out of context, better to blend in with the political culture of the day (a very un-Goldwater sentiment) with a more libertarian conservatism, marketable to 21st century Americans.

It is unlikely Friedrick Hayek, godfather of contemporary libertarianism, would have been impressed. Appended to the end of his 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty is an essay entitled “Why I am Not a Conservative,” distinguishing his (classically) liberal alternative to progressive ideologies from a simple resistance to change, the fundamental mark, in his view, of “any conservatism which deserve to be called such.”

The problem with conservatism, according to Hayek, is that

by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.

By this description, the Establishment Republican is a model conservative, offering to run the welfare state for ninety-seven waste-cutting cents on the dollar, tempering hyper-regulation with responsible cost-benefit analysis, and posing as the clear-eyed adult in every political room.

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But so, in its own way, is the Goldwater 2.0 conservative, following a pace and a half behind Progressive libertines on the one hand, while reconciling himself to the entrenched safety-first corporatism of the Wall Street-Washington ruling class, on the other.

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